W.j.c. Submits Proposals on Discrimination to United Nations Body

The World Jewish Congress today urged continuation of the Subcommission on the Prevention of Discrimination and the Protection of Minorities, while at the same time suggesting a number of items concerning these problems for inclusion on the agenda of the forthcoming sessions of the U.N. Economic and Social Council.

Speaking for the Congress, the fifth non-governmental organization to voice its regret over the recent Council decision to discontinue the subcommission after its current session, Maurice L. Perlzweig, said that his organization would like to see the decision reconsidered and the subcommission given a new mandate. If this proves impossible. Mr. Perlzweig told the subcommission, the Council should authorize the U.N. Secretary-General to appoint a committee of experts to advise any organ of the U.N. concerned in the future with the prevention of discrimination and the protection of minorities.

The first of the W.J.C. recommendations for agenda items for the next Council session concerned discrimination in immigration regulations. In a number of countries, Mr. Perlzweig said, immigration of members of certain religious or ethnic groups “is virtually barred” either by regulation or by administrative practice. Secondly, he continued, the council should deal with discriminatory restrictions on freedom of movement. A number of states, “especially in the Western Hemisphere,” he said, refused transit visas solely on the ground of place of birth, even if the applicant had left his native country in infancy. Such discrimination was not only irrational but inflicted gravest hardships on innocent people.

Thirdly, he suggested that an objective study be made of unofficial practices amounting to the enforcement of a “numerous clausus” or even the exclusion of members of certain groups from schools and universities. Such a study, he said, could be undertaken in consultation with UNESCO as a necessary preliminary to any action by the Economic and Social Council. The fourth question mentioned by Mr. Perlzweig concerned international safeguards for minority rights in newly established states. Pointing out that a number of countries had become, or were in the process of becoming, independent states with the help of the U.N. nations, he said that the history of their emancipation showed that independence was sometimes followed by repression or persecution of minorities. He urged that the U.N. devise a system of safe guards which would entail recognition by new states of “international concern” in the fate of their minorities.

Meanwhile, the subcommission today adopted, with the U.S.S.R. and Poland voting against, a recommendation for the “establishment, as part of any general implementation of the Covenant on Human Rights, of international machinery directly accessible to minorities, a method which would remedy the fact that, as matters now stand, a minority cannot put its case before the United Nations except through a foreign government, whose intervention may create international tension.”